Picture Perfect
by IguessIwritestuff
Summary: (Two-shot) All Rita ever wanted was one decent school photo.


One decent school picture. That's all Rita Loud ever asked for. All of her daughters had grown up to be quite pretty, and Lincoln was certainly handsome for his age. With eleven children, one of them was bound to be at least slightly photogenic, right?

Had she ever been wrong.

Lori had started the trend with her lopsided bangs in kindergarten, which she'd cut herself to try to look more like a character on a television show she liked. The following year, Leni had been facing away from the camera, and Lori pulled out a baby tooth during her photo. Luna, Luan, and Lynn's photos each got progressively worse than the last. In second grade, Lynn had a black eye, and the following year Luna insisted on playing the kazoo in her picture. Rita's personal favorite, however, was the year Luan had screamed while the man took the photo, and when asked why she'd explained that "I wanted the guy to wake up so he'd take better pictures!"

The older girls weren't alone in their plethora of terrible school photos. Lincoln always seemed to be caught mid-blink or picking at something on his shirt. That was an eight-year legacy at this point. Lucy had worn fake vampire fangs on more than one occasion, and used fake blood even more frequently. Lola, who could typically pose in an instant for a picture, had worn sunglasses in her photos for multiple years because she'd seen it on television. Lana was always filthy, no matter if school started at 8 am and she had her photo taken at 8:01. And judging by Lisa reading in her kindergarten and first grade school photos, she was going to follow along in the footsteps of her sisters and brother. Hopefully, Lily would end up being photogenic.

Rita couldn't even think about the group photos. In hopes that it would get better, she still valiantly signed off on the slip of paper the school sent home that said she wanted photos of all of the siblings who went to said school. If one Loud wasn't photogenic, putting multiple un-photogenic kids, especially siblings, in a group photo, was not a good idea. In a word: catastrophic. Year after year Luan would hold up rabbit ears behind someone's head, and Lynn would be dressed from head to toe in oversized sports gear. There was one year where Luna had been using Lynn's bike helmet as a drum, and that same year Lori had been talking on the phone while Leni gazed off into the distance.

It wasn't that Rita didn't love that her kids were so open towards expressing themselves. In fact, she loved that she could see each of their personalities in school photos. She just couldn't send them out to family members, because not everyone would appreciate the Loud kids' unique qualities.

The endless curse of the school photos just consistently escalated as they got older. Whether it was experimentation with makeup or clothing choices and even down to bad haircuts, no Loud was safe. She'd thought that by high school Luan wouldn't have brought in her infamous Groucho glasses for school photos, or that Lynn wouldn't have war paint smeared under her eyes (from early-morning football practice). Yet, those were the photos she'd received from her daughters last year, Lynn proclaiming it was "the best one yet". And sadly, it was.

This year, she'd been prepared, for the first time in a good 16 years since Lori's first photo catastrophe. Luan was beginning her senior year, Lynn following her as a junior. As the two oldest in the house, Rita was going to try to get at least one decent picture of each of them, since their series of photos were unmistakably the worst in the collection.

The girls had been walking in the door after a draining day of school when they were whisked aside by their mother, who pulled them into her bedroom. Lynn looked down at the series of school photos spread out on their mother's bed, and then looked at her sister inquisitively.

"Mom, are you okay?" Lynn piped up, picking up her first grade school photo and laughing at how the cameraman had perfectly captured her face as she was 'scratching' at her nose. "Why do you have out all of our old pictures?"

"She's reminiscing." Luan whispered, and sighed when she saw the dumbfounded look on her sister's face. "She's remembering when we were little, Lynn. She's remembering when all of us were little."

"Oh." Lynn said quietly, looking at a grand total of definitely over 100 photos between herself and all of her siblings. "Mom, are you sad?"

Rita had let out a long sigh. "A little bit, honey." she'd replied. "It's been 16 years. Sixteen years of terrible school photos. I love them, because you're my daughters and son, but your aunts and uncles don't appreciate them the same way I do."

Luan's hazel eyes went wide, and she looked down at the photos and smiled halfheartedly. "Look at how little we were." she said, pointing to a particularly awkward group photo, Lynn knew what she had to ask, and sighed before letting the words form.

"So you want a good school photo. One that you're not embarrassed to send out to Grandma or your brothers and sisters." Lynn put a hand on her hip. What was wrong with some of the pictures anyways? Last year's photo, in Lynn's mind, was great. However, it apparently didn't meet their mother's standard of whatever the heck she was looking for.

Luan had promptly grabbed her sister's wrist, pulling her further away from their mother. "I think we should do it. Mom does so much for us." Luan said, the light reflecting off of her braces glinting into Lynn's eyes.

Lynn shrugged in return. "I'm not great at math, but I know a few things. Good school photo, plus us getting along, equals happy Mom. And happy Mom plus something equals happy Dad. And happy Dad equals car keys."

Luan sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "You want tacos."

"I want tacos." Lynn spoke over her sister's words, following it with a punch to the arm. "See? You know me so well."


End file.
